Ashleigh Hill
About Mission Year
Mission Year is a year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship. We take teams of young people, place them in an area of need, and help them to serve people and create community. We are committed to the command of Jesus to “love God and love people,” by placing the needs of our neighbors first and developing committed disciples of Christ with a heart for the poor. Learn more about our first year program…
Ashleigh Hill's Blog
the continuously fractured life. / Aug 3, 11:16 AM
As I’ve been a compulsive blogger all year, I’ve been harping over my last Mission Year blog for a few weeks. Right now I’m sitting at O’Hare airport as a Mission Year alum, juggling my feelings of judgment, joy, and sadness over the past 12 months and the next few.
Yesterday, on our way to a cookout at Shawn’s house our friend T stopped us and we said goodbye. He told us that before he knew who we were he had followed us home a few times to check us out. I wonder how many people knew where I lived all year because of my skin color and walking habits. I wonder how many conversations started after we walked by. I wonder how much safer we were because we were friends with the neighborhood drug dealer and he could vouch for our authenticity in living on Monroe St. I try to explain things like social justice, love, and Christianity to myself in a complete manner and they always fractures apart in my hands like this. It gets really messy, which I think is alright. God loves people, especially people on the margins. People are messy. The margins are messy.
One of the reasons I did Mission Year was because I was so scared of the life I was living, which was a completely fine life. I can’t explain how the lineage of working, hanging out, dating, going on vacations, getting married, getting a raise, having kids, buying a house, and retiring, is a terrifying chain for me but it is (see the character of Laura Brown in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours for an explanation, minus the issues of sexuality and suicide). Still, this is a chain I want, I just want them in a different context that I was unaware even existed. But, now I feel a little more moved into the future. Maybe I can participate in all these things with an undertone of the kingdom of heaven.
Maybe every job in the world won’t suck the life out of me and maybe I can do something that actually makes a difference. Maybe I can run fast and hard toward true womanhood and not a world of petty girlhood disguised as femininity. Maybe I can marry someone and we can spur each other on instead of retreating into our own created, world. Maybe I can buy a house and open it up to everyone as their own house. Maybe I can make a lot of money and give half my salary away. Maybe I can make $12 an hour for the rest of my life and not care. Maybe I don’t have to live up to a false American standard I never wanted for myself anyway. And maybe there are a lot of other people in the world believing these same things.
Mission Year is kind of a trick. You do it because you want to learn how to live like God calls you to and have no money and do something daring, all the while wearing your Toms shoes. And you do. And then you realize that the program is building you up to be a contemplative, neighborly, member of the church you want to see in the world; the year is just the intense training process.
Blogging has been an excellent creative outlet for me as a writer and story-teller. If you want to keep reading, I’ll sporadically be similarly blogging at http://ashleighfhill.tumblr.com/
Thanks for reading.
Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?
Acts 26:8
My Unsuccessful Life / Jul 13, 04:59 PM
“Success and failure, ultimately, have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified – whichever came first … Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. I’m not opposed to success; I just think we should accept it only if it is a by-product of our fidelity. If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.” *
A lot of people have asked me if Mission Year has measured its success rate in the neighborhoods in which it works, or what percentage of Breakthrough’s residents have success with employment and housing. I understand the concern and am sure there are ways to measure these things. Still, what defines success in the midst of layers upon layers of emotional, addictive, familiar, and systematic injustices? That is different for every person I’ve met and neighborhood I’ve been in this year. It is different in Chicago and in Atlanta (and Philly, Houston, etc). I think what matters is that Mission Year and Breakthrough are standing where conventional wisdom says not to stand. So, how do and why should we measure our work in a conventional manner? We do not serve a conventional God.
“Teilhard de Chardin wrote that we must ‘trust in the slow work of God.’ Ours is a God who waits. Who are we not to? It takes what it takes for the great turnaround. Wait for it.” *
I’ve talked to or e-mailed a lot of you about a woman who comes to our shelter with sever chemical sensitivity and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We fight with her every. single. day. I have to force myself to say “good morning” to her. Sometimes she tells me I am trying to kill her or that the change of clothes I’m offering her are “filthy”. On Saturday we walked into a local diner to have lunch with a friend and this woman was sitting in the building. The waitress seated us at the table next to hers. I threw an internal fit and then Meredith and I went and said hello and talked for a minute. I felt horrible the whole meal: angry that she was there, mad that I was angry, prayful for her life and struggles, horrified that she might find out where we live, mad at myself again. I always think about how lonely she must be. When we were about to leave she walked over to our table and told all of us how much she appreciates Carrie, Meredith, and I and how we are her friends and how we’re hospitable and loving. I was floored. This woman that the world has literally thrown out (she’s not allowed in most area shelters), who is terrified of the outdoors in which she lives, and who is literally impossible to deal with considers us her friends. We’ve prayed non-stop that the Lord would provide for her and, in His own way, He has provided. She is absolutely both a success story and a tragedy: indefinable except as a human being Breakthrough has tried to stand by. She is surviving and not surviving at the same time. Is this a good result? It’s certainly not someone I would have chosen to stand by.
“Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.”
*All quotes from Tattoos on the Heart by, Gregory Boyle.
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The people. / Jul 13, 04:58 PM
Either I am nobody or I am a nation. – Derek Walcott
This morning I was sitting with some of our women eating breakfast and one of our residents walked in the room and asked, “Does anyone know where Ashleigh is?” I was sitting right in front of her and said, “I’m right here.”
She said, “I didn’t see you, you looked like the people.”
I said, “I am the people.”
She said, “You look like the people.”
I only have a few weeks left at Breakthrough and I’m trying to nail down lessons I’ve learned from working at a homeless shelter. There are so many that it’s almost impossible and I’m not really sure why I feel the need to do it. Closure maybe? Let me make a firm statement that there is no closure to this year. It will continue to occupy me for (I hope) the rest of my life.
Somewhere I read that “the people must be for the people” and that is the largest truth I have learned. I understand the value and importance in knowing that God knows us individually; I believe it is a life-altering realization. Loving yourself helps you best love God and others. Seeing Christ in others is also life altering. The importance of putting all others on the exact same level as you is just as imperative. Eugene Peterson won me over when he wrote, “I am not myself by myself.”
Sometimes, when people hear this argument, they get antsy – like an idealistic political system for forcibly sharing all our money is being promoted. No. I don’t believe in political systems or money. I believe in Jesus. I believe in making myself exactly equal to everyone. Also, I might add that doing this is nearly impossible, which is another reason I believe in Jesus.
“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”
Romans 12:2-5
I’ve learned that I believe in the people more than I believe in discussable ideologies (although I do love a good discussion). “[People] are the light of the world.” I want to put down my reasons for not giving someone 50 cents and I want to give them 50 cents. I want to view a friend’s abusive boyfriend as a human being and not only as an abuser (while not condoning his behavior). I want to look at someone, anyone, and see that that person is Jesus, no matter how they are treating me. I am still far from this. I want to make eye contact with everyone who speaks to me. I want to know that the God I doubt in my head is infinitely smaller than the real God.
Last week I was at Cornerstone Music Festival recruiting for Mission Year. The two tables next to ours belonged to two organizations I think have this figured out. One was Random People Who Care (http://randompeoplewhocare.com), an online organization praying for people who ask for prayer. Every morning at the festival they got together and prayed specifically for everyone who asked for prayer the day before. The other organization was ChristCycles (www.christcycles.com). They build bikes and sell them for $250 (it’s worth over $300). They then work with local churches to find people who need bikes and can’t afford them. Then they sell them the very same bike for about $40. Obviously they make no return. They fund it with their own money from day jobs. I asked the owner how long they plan on having a non-lucrative business and he said, “for the rest of my life.”
Today a woman who has had the biggest positive influence on our time at Breakthrough moved out. I couldn’t even look at her without crying because she is an encouragement to me. She thinks she doesn’t know the Lord as well as we do, which is a lie that blows my mind wide apart. She is a saint. During a Come-and-See Weekend she said she couldn’t believe we were making her a part of our lives and introducing her to our families. I think the most important thing I’ve learned is that I want to live a life that never makes anyone feel like they are not worth introductions.
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The field. / Jun 17, 04:11 PM
I can never decide if I should write what is weighing on my heart or what happens in EGP every day or, a combination of both.
Last Sunday, on our way to the grocery store, the bus stopped to pick up a passenger and two other people where huddling over the bus stop bench. I realized they were making crack lines. Then I saw them snort them. Then the bus pulled away. Sometimes, I can see these things, accept them, and move on. Sometimes I can’t. I see hurting people snort their addictions off public benches and I can’t do anything. Then, all of a sudden I’m at Aldi, where soy sauce is “seasonal,” trying to spend less than $60 on a week’s worth of dinners for 5 or more people. It’s like being in two, inflexible worlds at once.
I know there are drugs in the suburbs (this is another topic all together) but their usage is hidden. Jeff and Pedro saw some dealers down the block throw a baggie of powder down to a buyer on the street, in broad daylight. It was a whole production. Sometimes vices are quiet but nothing is hidden here. Things are a shock and not a shock at the same time.
We had our second annual benefit a few nights ago. This one was held at the Harold Washington Library and was pretty classy if I do say so myself. As I was sitting listening to a few alumni share their stories, the table next to ours distracted me. A few women sitting at it wouldn’t stop loudly whispering and visibly texting. They continued all night. I don’t mean or want to call out Mission Year donors but it hurt my feelings and my heart. It took all the energy I had left not to walk over and politely tell them that they were being disrespectful to everything I have poured my mind, soul, spirit, and energy into for the past 10 months. I absolutely judged them and I have no culminating story about how they later redeemed themselves. I am still unsettled with the whole situation. I don’t want to judge and I don’t want to observe people not paying attention. Being distracted by them made me want to cancel my cell phone, delete my Facebook and never own a TV or pay for internet service again because I am so worn-out from seeing people distracted by material things in the face of truth.
Thanks to this year, I understand Matthew 13: 44 now:
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”
A day laborer sells all he has and buys a field for one, small part of it. He sells everything to make heaven his own; he doesn’t steal the treasure and leave the field for someone else to tend. We search for the kingdom of heaven, the treasure, and buy all that is attached to it. In his book Simple Spirituality, Chris Heuertz reminds us that Christ did what the day laborer did – He gave away his life to make us His own. I’ve never thought of it that way. He did not steal us or pick around the dirty parts.
So, the field. I have been thinking about it a lot. Is it notable that the scriptures mention the field so specifically? If the man is us (or Christ) what is the field? Maybe it means nothing but it’s preoccupied me.
Maybe the field includes the people at the bus bench and at the distracting table. If “Christ is all and Christ is in all,” then, yes, Christ is in the situation that causes a man to bag up 5 ounces of cocaine and toss it out the window. God bought that circumstance. So, do I buy it and approach it because Christ does? What do I ignore which Christ has already bought? I am a missionary living in the ‘hood and the field includes splintery cocaine and shiny purses yielding warm Blackberries. I take this all with the treasure of Christ who has overcome the world. That is a big, muddy, expensive statement for a day laborer.
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Devil Town / Jun 7, 09:36 PM
This is a poem I read/sang at Mission Year’s Chicago Speak Up event.
Devil Town
With Devil Town by Daniel Johnston
I walk
The line pulled broken
Glass thin between two redemption
Songs, kicking rocks
Down tiny ravines
In the road
My tight throat
Turning toward
Big-bellied abuses and
Tiny, palmed pills
Singing:
I was living in a devil town
Didn’t know it was a devil town
Oh Lord, it really brings me down
About the devil town.
I witness the edge of the earth –
Cramming the toothy line between
Sky and solid,
Skinned city
Like a harassed heart beat and I
Sing:
All my friends were vampires
Didn’t know they were vampires
Turns out I was a vampire myself
In the devil town.
My daylight demons and I,
We think about Jesus –
His hands hauled up,
And feet packed back into
The tepid tomb
Singing:
I was living in a devil town
Didn’t know it was a devil town
Oh Lord, it really brings me down
About the devil town.
